Sunday, May 31, 2015

Trinity Sunday and Memorial
Day, May 31th, 2015But Peter and the apostles answered, "We must obey God rather than any human authority. (Act 5:29 NRS)

When all other British-born Methodist preachers left during
the American Revolution, only Francis Asbury stayed behind and continued to
plant churches, traveling some 6,000 miles each year by horse.He is said to have influenced the planting of
some of the very first Methodist congregations in northern Iredell County, such
as Mt Bethel (1797) Moss Chapel (1799) and Snow Creek (1801).

One day someone asked Rev. Asbury why he was always
preaching on the passage "Surely ye must be born again." Bishop Asbury is said to have had a simple
answer, "Because surely ye must
be."(From a sermon by Alex Stevenson, “Why You Must Give Your
Life to Christ”, at www.goodprecher.com).

Perhaps that was the sentiment of the majority of Methodists,
the Baptists and Presbyterians around
here at the end of the 18th century, but that’s surely not the most common
sentiment now.Today faith is mostly personal
or private matter, only widely accepted as an opinion, an option, or a
recreational pastime.Some of us may
have memories of a time when we ‘had’ to go to church was part of everyone's expectation.

WHO’S IN CHARGE?

“Why do I have to
become a Christian?”“Why should I join or participate in a Church?”
or Why should I take Jesus seriously
when he said, “I am the way, the truth,
and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me?”Haven’t we learned that the world is a bigger,
a lot more complex and complicated than when Peter first said,“Repent
and be Baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus” (Acts 2.38)?How could anyone today dare suggest, as the church
once preached, that ‘there is no other name
given under heaven that has been given among mortals, by which we must
be saved’ (Acts 4:12)?Aren’t there
all kinds of other ways to be saved?

This kind of exclusive, demanding, or decisive biblical ‘musts’ makes what happens in this text especially
interesting.When Peter and the other
apostles went around preaching, healing, and witnessing to the name of Jesus
Christ, they came in direct conflict with the prevailing authorities.Those authorities felt seriously threatened by this outright,
non-negotiable, unqualified claim “that
there is salvation in no one else… (Acts 4.12).Even though the message came from the ‘uneducated and ordinary’, the
authorities still ‘ordered them’ not
to speak of him any more.But even after they had been ‘put in prison’ (5:18) they would not
stop and were being reprimanded again: “We
gave you strict orders not to teach in his name, yet you have filled Jerusalem
with your teaching….” (5:28).Why
are these apostles so obstinately and persistently hard headed?Why were they so insistent?Who do they think they are?It is Peter who gives us the answer as he
goes from saying ‘we can’t keep fromspeaking….” (Acts
4: 20) to saying more forcefully, “We mustobey God rather than
any human authority (Act
5:29 NRS).

Did you catch that word again?Must?Was it really all that serious?Can
the church require that anyone ‘must’
believe such a dogmatic, inflexible, uncompromising concept of salvation or
obedience to God?How dare the church
demand anything from me, from you, or from anyone other than what I want to do
or have?

Peter’s unyielding
words goes straight to the heart of an issue that is still current for us. ‘Who’s
really in charge of my life or in charge of this world?’Should a certain
religious perspective be our ultimate concern?Is a certain political perspective really what is decisive for our future?Is a certain scientific proof determinative for everything else we should believe,
think, say or do, or is the truth always relative to whatever I decide is true
for me?In a world where truth seems
more uncertain than anything is for certain, how can the church preach, teach
any kind of truth that would demand to be taken so seriously?

Besides, who
cares?It’s a free country, isn’t
it?I can decide what I want and who I
want to be, can’t I?Isn’t that where
most people are in their thinking?Aren’t
we smarter than to let our lives be controlled by any ‘must’ at all, let alone the commands of a demanding, difficult God
who is proclaimed as ‘Lord ofheaven and earth (Acts 17.24)?If God’s really that big, then why doesn’t he
come down and say so himself?Why does he
keep making demands on little people like us when we can’t see that he is who he
says he is?

On a particular
Sunday, the church sets apart for preaching about Christ the King, the former Dean of Duke Chapel,Will Willimon, tells how he once asked the
congregation present whether or not Americans actually need a king to be in
charge over their lives? “Do you need a king?Of course,” he continued, “since we are Americans, democratically
disposed, we are averse to monarchy.”Right?

But he went
on to say he wasn’t “talking about some
polo-playing playboy who dabbles in architecture.”He was
talking about a real king.He said
he also wasn’t talking about “a pleasant
woman clutching a purse, wearing a small hat and sensible shoes.” He was “talking
about a lord who would set things right, somebody’s who’s really in charge.” In his sermon he went on to talk about the
lordship and kingship of Jesus Christ who is the only rightful ruler of all
life and the universe.Can’t imagine to
many people at Duke taking such a sermon seriously as they do basketball, can
you?

After that
service, as people exited, some mumbled ‘nice sermon’, but one lady clutching a
purse, wearing a small hat and sensible shoes stopped. “Did it not occur to you
that you might have British subjects in the congregation today?“Our queen is ten times the Christian of your
silly actor president,” she
shouted.

“I wouldn’t put that to a vote here, he responded
in jest.”She didn’t
get the joke.“You’re not funny, and I
intend to report you to your superiors.”Willimon answered that since he
was a preacher from South Carolina, he had no idea who his superiors were.”“Stuff
like that is why we broke away from those people” someone commented.” The strange thing, Willimon added, is that this
lady really did understand his point, maybe better than anyone.The question we all must answer is: “Who is on
the throne?Who rules?Who’s in charge of our lives?(From W. Willimon’s sermon, “Who’s
In Charge Here” in The Collected Sermon of William H. Willimon,WJK Press, 2010, pp. 159-160).

WHO’S REALLY NOTIN CHARGE?

What ‘s most
remarkable about the story of the church in Acts is not just that it settles ‘who’s
in charge’ or what we ‘must’ believe,
but Luke also takes great pains to show us how these people who thought they
were in charge, really weren’t.

Isn’t it
amazing how threatened these very powerful Jewish leaders were by these ‘uneducated and ordinary’ (4.13) men who
were preaching about a rejected, betrayed, denied and crucified man, whom they
now claimed has been raised from (4.10)?Do you see just how ridiculous a claim like that would be, if it wasn’t
true?Who would believe this?Why were these controlling, dominating,
leaders worried? Why didn’t they just
laugh their way back to their seats of power and relax?

Well for one
thing, Luke shows us that they were worried because ‘a lame man from birth’ was now walking around praising God ‘in the name of Jesus’ (3: 6-10).They were all worked up and worried about a
movement, no one really knew yet what to name.Even the angel who commanded them to preach ‘the whole message about this life’ (Acts 5.20) didn’t know. But it
kept growing (5.14) beyond anyone’s control as a ‘message’ and a ‘movement’
that seemed to have a life of its own.

Also, the
people who were in charge were worried because Peter and the apostles grew even
bolder in their sermons and speeches (4.29, 31).‘A
great number of people’ were gathering even from the towns around Jerusalem
(5:16) as rumors about all kinds of ‘signs
and wonders’ were circulating among the people (5: 12, 16).Most of all, they were worried because when
they had to call the ‘whole body of
elders of Israel’ together to bring charges against these they had already locked
up, when the guards went to retrieve them, they found the prison doors still closed
and locked, but the prisoners were all gone.Guess where they found them next?‘Standing in the temple’ teaching the people (5:19-25), preaching
the same message that had put them in prison in the first place.It is a
bit humorous to revisit how ‘out of control’ the situation was for the temple police (5. 22,26).They must have looked something like the ‘Keystone
cops’, for even when they brought Peter to stand before them, reminding him of
‘strict orders not to teach’ (5:28),
he started preaching straight in their faces!

Do you see
just how unnerving the whole situation was for the power people?The people who think they are in control have
their hands tied behind their backs, so to speak, and the people who were put in
chains and cells, keep going free.And
when the lest they could do was ‘order
them not to speak in the name of Jesus (40) ever again, it was like laying
a match to gasoline, for now, ‘every
day in the temple they did not cease to teach and proclaim Jesus as the Messiah’
(5.42).

Yet there is
something else, even more startling and perhaps alarming for us.Before you take your hat off to these apostles,
thinking they were about to take world by storm or single-handedly change of
the course of Israel’s history, think again!The Spirit that was leading them was leading many of them straight into
the crosshairs of even greater challenges,more persecution, and even greater problems that
were attached to all these new possibilities.Whatever this story is, it is certainly
not some fly by night, winner take all, happy ending fairy tale story.Jesus had promised that the Spirit would
fill them and send them out, but he also promised it would be something they
would have no complete control over. He
not only ordered them to ‘wait on the
Spirit’ (Acts 1.4) to empower them to “be
witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts
1.8),but he also told them that ‘it was not for (them) to know the times or periods when or how the
Father would restore Israel (1.6) and he also implied that they will
sometimes get more than they bargain for, as this word ‘witness’ also means ‘martyr’!
‘They will bring you before the
synagogues and the rulers and the authorities. Do not
be anxious how or what you are to answer or what you are to say; for the Holy
Spirit will teach you in that very our what you are to say (Luke 12:11-12)
.Jesus not only promised the Spirit
would give them the words ‘to say’ but he also promised that if they were true
to Jesus, they would, in some shape or form, lose their life, if they truly wanted to find it (Mark 8.35).

However we
interpret what really happened in the early church, we must not get the picture
that the lives of these ‘spirit-filled’, dynamic and adventurous apostles were some
like some fictitious Hollywood lives thrown on the screen of our religious
memory filled with glamour and material success.This ‘must’
they were obeying and the ‘must’
they were following would eventually bring them as much fear, trembling and
suffering, as it would also bring adventure, purpose and meaning into their
lives.Could it be that the ‘greatfear that seized the whole church’ (5.5) came not just because of
what happened to Ananias and Sappharia, but because of what would happen to many
of them as they obeyed the ‘must’ of
this demanding Holy Spirit?

Truly, the
things that were happening to them, or even happening through them, were dangerous
and endangering powers that were beyond their control.Even
though, as this text says, these apostles were released after they were ‘flogged’ (40), one commentator was
right to remark that: “39 lashes has
killed many a prisoner.” Furthermore, the ‘rejoicing’ (41) they did was not because they
had received a free ticket to glory, but it was because of the pain they were
ready and willing to endure to tell the truth they could not avoid(From “Acts”: Interpretation, a
Bible commentary for Teaching and Preaching,William H. Willimon,2010, p. 58,
location 1211, Kindle Edition).

It’s
intriguing that this God who sprang prison bars open will just as easily close some
of those doors, allowing the spirit-filled Stephen to be killed by stoning (Acts
7), or to permit the head of the
Jerusalem church, James, to be killed by the sword (Acts 12) or even to let
Paul, his most daring missionary to be beaten, stoned, shipwrecked and
imprisoned many times (2 Cor. 11.25) and finally to be beheaded in Rome, although
he had prayed and planned to go on to Spain (Rom 16.24).Perhaps even Peter himself was wondering how
his own situation would soon change, since Jesus had promised him ‘you will stretch out your hands, and
someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish
to go."After getting Peter
all worked up about his own mortality, then
Jesus challenged "Follow me." (John 21:18-19).

Is this ‘must’ of full, unwavering,
life-demanding obedience any way to call a disciple or build a church?Wouldn’t people stay away from it?Perhaps, this is the only way call a true disciple
of Jesus.You can manipulate a person to
join a church or you can try to get people to sign up for heaven with all kinds
of tricks, but there is only one way to call a person to follow Jesus
Christ.It requires that they hear, heed
some fully engaging‘musts’ in their lives.“You must be born again (John 3:7)!We
must obey God rather than mortals (Acts 5.29)!Even when someone has sinned against you 7
times or 7 times 70, and then repents,“You must forgive“ (Lk 17.4).“Each
of us must please our neighbor(Rom 15.2).When God calls a (disciple), God calls them to come and die!The one who said this was hung for following
his ‘must’ (Bonhoeffer).We would all
wish to ignore ‘musts’ like that.

It would be nice
to think we could have the Christian life another way, without all the daily musts we have to do to remain faithful
each day, without giving anything up.We’d like to think that the power, the miracles, the healing, the
growth, and all the other wonderful things that happened in that early church
could fit into our shrinking church budgets or be stuff into our own church
tool boxes, so we can decide whether to adopt or how to adapt them for own plans.But that’s
not what happened then, nor is it what really happens now.

If we learn
anything in the Bible about the God of the Bible, it is that we, you, nor I,
nor any Christian, Church or person, can ever put God in any kind of box.That’s why the Jews never wrote down his
‘name’, nor let anyone go near him, if they could help it.You can’t put the true God is a Jewish box, a
Roman Catholic box, a Baptist or Methodist box, nor any other box, beit contemporary, traditional, for that matter.If you think you have this God pegged or
cornered, he is the God who keeps breaking loose, springing out, stirring
things up, and then releasing new ‘fiery
tongues’ to burn up whatever words and ways we have devised to try to control
or bottle him up.

Besides,
haven’t you noticed that what happened in the early movement of Spirit in the
church, for the most part, seldom happens today?If something like that does happen, as it has
from time to time, no one has ever been successfully able to control or
manipulate the miracles of the true God.No one can control where or whether the ‘signs and wonders’ will happen, nor have they been fully prepared
for when they won’t.There is no safe place to hide or reside away
from this God, except for placing ourselves under the shelter under his mighty wings.Have you ever tried feeling safe and secure
under the wings of a high flying bird?

Recently I
read how a Texas pastor, a Baptist preacher, entered the pulpit and
told his congregation that, if they really wanted to be Christian, they needed
not to have any of symbol of allegiance in their sanctuary other than the
cross.He then recommended that the
children stop pledging allegiance to the American flag at VBS, since this our
land is not really a Christian country, and then he, as their spiritual leader,
saying he was inspired by the Holy Spirit, advised they should take the flag
out of the church once and for all and not lift up anything alongside of this truly
invisible, truly demanding God.Do you
know how well that went over?Today he’s
a Mennonite pastor in Virginia.

Or maybe
you’ve heard about the other Mennonite pastor in Virginia, Kenneth Miller, who
was recently convicted for and jailed for aiding an international Kidnapping
scheme.A woman from Vermont came to his
church in Virginia seeking a new way of life in Christ, renouncing her former
life, and wanting to take her daughter away from the court order to share
custody with her former Lesbian partner.The pastor helped her arrange to move to Canada, and then to Nicaragua,
stating that God’s law trumps Federal law, adding that the government has no
business redefining marriage(http://news.yahoo.com/va-pastor-gods-law-reigns-same-sex-dispute-074138627.html).

I told obeying
the ‘must’ of a demanding and decisive God could get you in trouble.However you come to understand what you must
or mustn’t do, the only guarantee I can give you in your obedience to him is
that you will never control your own destiny ever again.Just
like in Luke’s picture of the early church, when the Spirit is obeyed,the
powerful nor the faithful were in control, nor were they assured of what would
happen next.

THE GOD WHO RULES

So, how can I
dare preach that we ‘must obey God’ when
there are no guarantees or when the question of control will demand that you
release your own control of what happens next?What might encourage any of us who are still holding on, or holding out,
to obey God or even to rejoice, if we too might have to ‘suffer dishonor for the sake of the name?’
(5.41).

Strangely
enough it was a wise and respected Pharisee of the Jewish council named
Gamaliel, who Luke offers as encouragement for obedience and trust.Gamaliel was a Jewish rabbi, and not even a
member of this new movement, but he was a very smart man—a man who understood very
well just what the stakes are, and just how dangerous it would be to go against
the God who will always be bigger than your plans or my plans, our desires, our
wants, wishes, or to any predictable human hope.

Knowing from
Isaiah that God’s ways are not human ways, or that God can be just as
indiscernible as he is demanding, Gamaliel reminds these leaders who might just
make their next wrong move, just how dangerous it could be.‘Fellow Israelites’‘consider
carefully’what you propose to do…” (5.35). Could he be talking to me or you?If all this “activity” (NIV) or ‘undertaking’
(NRSV) or ‘work’ (KJV)is only of human energy, it will eventually
fail.But, then he cautions, “but if this does come from God, you
will notstop it (NIV)and if you go up against it, and
it is from God, you will find yourself “fighting
against God….” (5: 38-39). This line
of reasoning is what persuaded them
to stop, to think, and to wait.

But what line
of reasoning was this?What got their attention
about ‘going up against God’ that doesn’t get people’s attention today?What moved them to realize with Paul, that God
would be true and liars couldbe madeout of each and every one of us? (Rom
3.4)?Isn’t this eternal, unresolvable, irrevocable possibility
of error where the ‘must’ of the
church always comes from?Isn’t this why
I must be born again, and again, and
again?Isn’t this why I must obey God rather than mere mortals?Isn’t this why I must forgive 7 times 70, even when I don’t want to or don’t know
how?Isn’t this why I must live to please my neighbor, and not just please myself.I must,
and the church must, and we all must, because we could end up on the
wrong side of a gulf that is fixed and cannot be reversed.

Isn’t this
the day for you to realize that the ‘right side’ is the place where you must let God decide?With the rest of the church, and with
Gamaliel too, we must decide to stand
together and find God’s side?Is there
any other logical option?“Let this be our logic, wrote John
Calvin, “that which is of God must needs
stand, though all the world say nay!”(From Calvin, John (2012-08-26). The
Complete Biblical Commentary Collection of John Calvin (Kindle Locations
420887-420888).. Kindle Edition).

Have you
decided what you mustdo
with or for God today?Remember
Gamiliel’s logic:You are not as much in
charge of what happens next, as you think you are?Amen.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

"Peter asked, "why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land?"(Act 5:3 NRS)

In the
Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther was in exile for challenging the excesses
of the church of his day, he spent most of his time translating the New
Testament into the German language.That
translation singlehandedly united all German dialects and basically became the
German language spoken today.

I’ve been
in that castle, located in Eisenach, and in the room where Luther did his
translating.When you walk into the
room, you will see a small table and chair where Luther sat.Most interestingly, on the wall behind the
table is a large splash of ink, still visible, where Luther is said to have
thrown his ink well at the devil who, at that time, was attempting to torment
and interrupt him.

Luther had his ‘demons’ to fight against, as all of us do. Luther was able to stand up unafraid of his
opposition, essentially saying, without fear, “The Church stands on the Word of God….Here I stand, I cannot do
otherwise”When you have someone doing
great good, as Luther did, standing up against corruption and vice, you will
also find opposition, struggle and the potential for evil to raise up its ugly
head in resistance.Luther understood
this, and once he made another statement we must hear today because it is
well-represented in the text before us.Luther said, “Whenever and wherever
God builds a church, the devil also builds a chapel.”“And most often,” added Daniel Defoe, the author of the story of
Robinson Crusoe, “the devil has the
larger congregation.”

INSPIRING GENEOSITY

It is
certainly true, especially in the text before us, that the devil will try to
build a chapel beside the church God is building.But before we take a closer look how the
devil’s chapel may spring up at any time, I want us to begin by looking closely
at the good, glorious, and generous church God wants to build.

Ever
wonder what would it have been like to be part of the electrifying beginnings
of the early church?Luke tells us that
‘the whole group of those who believed
were of one heart and soul….” (4:32).When I ride up and down the countryside, and see small little churches
barely existing, but not far apart from each other, I dream about what all
these little churches could do if they would were one church, one people, and
one congregation, standing together rather than standing separate to confront
the loveless world.

If
this is how it once was, what happened?Why are we the scattered instead of the gathered?Of course most of our churches developed
before modern transportation, but that’s not the whole story.Today churches can seem to be more
competitive than cooperative.Jesus
prayed that we would be ‘one’ (Jn.
17:11), but today we are more used to be “many minds” than “of one mind.”While I don’t think we can repeat the miracle
that was the early church, we can certainly learn from it and we can see our
own potential to do great good as being an ‘alternative’ community to the world
we know.

Luke
tells us that the church in Acts were of ‘one
heart and soul’, everything they ‘owned
was held everything in common’ (4:32, they gave ‘testimony’ to Christ alive in their own lives, and they share ‘great grace’ from God. The major impact was that: “There was not a needy person among them….”
(4:34. We even read ho one among them, whom they nicknamed ‘son of encouragement,’ showed his own
generous spirit by ‘selling a field’
and giving the proceeds for the needs of the community.How can we imagine a church in the Spirit
that is also generous, selfless, giving and caring?

As
landowners, farmers with a common heritage, we can remember times when there
was more sharing, helping, and working together to bring in the harvest or
survive against elements of life.Among
some this still goes on, and it should continue.The generosity we share together as a people
together instead of people apart makes life worth living.This text in no way implies giving up ‘private property’, as was wrongly
forced in the failure of communism, but it encourages voluntary sharing of our
time, talents and treasures with each other for the benefit of the community
good.The good of community is important
because nothing is really ‘ours’ alone, and because we also know that the more
we share and the more we spread care around, the more it comes back to us and we
dare to build the kind of living that makes sense and build the kind of
communities that makes sense up against the coldness and cruelty of the world
around us.

In the
book, Five Practices of Fruitful
Congregations,Robert Schnase, a
Methodist Bishop, tells of how one of the churches under his care, had a
special baptism service, where the several families were up front after the
service taking pictures.One of the
mother’s needed to get something out of her purse, an elderly man close byoffered to hold the baby for a moment.As people continued to come by to offer their
congratulations, the elderly man would say to them,“Oh, this is not my mine, I’m just holding
him for a moment…”The next day there
was a knock on the pastor’s study door.It was that elderly man who wanted to speak to the pastor.The pastor at first, worried whether or not
this might be some kind of complaint aboutthe service, but as the elderly man sat down, he shared with the pastor
how he wanted to change his will to include the church.He said that while he was holding that baby,
he realized that when he was holding the baby of those new members, that we at
this church are not many families, but we are also one family, and that I have
a responsibility to help that family and that child just like I have a responsibility
to help my family and my grandchildren.

What
would a ‘generous’ people look like among us?It has many difference faces, but from this text we can know it starts
by being more than a people apart, but to be a people together, for the good of
our children, their children, and all the children of the world.A generous community is a bold witness kind
of community that is rightly called both spiritual and Christian.This is the kind of community that still runs
against the grain of our very selfish world, and reminds us all that what can
have is not just counted in dollars and sense, but is also counted with sense
and sharing.Can you imagine a church
filled with God’s generous spirit?It’s
not just about the money, but it is what we treasure because, ‘where
our treasures are, our hearts will be also’.The greatest wealth is to care and to be
cared about.

INIVITING EVIL

Unfortunately,
in a fallen world, we find that ‘the devil’ also works to build his own chapel
out of the ‘good will’ of the community.As they come to lay their gifts ‘at
the apostles feet’ (4.37) ‘an act of
deceit interrupts … the progress of the people of God’ (FF Bruce). The forward momentum stops when text says, “BUT a man named Ananias, with the consent
of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property…. and brought only a part and
laid it at the apostles feet” (5:1).What is being underscored here is
not the lesser value of their gift, but it is their insincerity, their
pretense, and their deliberate deception and dishonesty in this scheme.Twice Luke tells us that this man did this ‘with the consent of his wife’ (5.1) and
‘with his wife’s knowledge’ (5:2).This is a big deal because they were purposely undercutting the grace and generosity
of God, trying to privately gain off of the compassionate giving of others,
making it appear they too wholeheartedly with them, when in reality, they were
holding back.

Peter
confronts them directly: “Why has Satan
filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the
proceeds…?” You have not lied to us, but to God! (5.3, 4). It is the ‘lie’ against the Holy Spirit
that has invited evil into this caring, compassionate, and generous
congregation.It is the lie of pretense,
of saying one thing, but doing another.It is the lie of saying that you are a giving, caring, and compassionate
person, but the truth is that all you care about is you, yourself, your own benefit,
and your own advancement.Self-serving,
insincere hearts interrupt and violate the spiritual flow of God’s grace.

While the
people of God worked to build a community that cares, “the devil was also at work constructing his perpendicular chapel.Len
Sweet continues, that the devil’s chapel has grown so large and
tall that it has been able to take its choir on the road, a choir that happily
sings the devil's favorite song.The tune the devil loves to hear is the discordant
sound of a million voices all singing their own song no harmony, no melody, no
chorus only a devilish din of solos.The devil’s song has only one rule of composing: The first person
singular.The “I” or “the devil’s I” is all there is. There is no “we”, no “she”,
no “he”, nor is there a “they” to consider.Everything is intently focused on ‘me, mine and I” to the exclusion of
everyone else.

How
many have left church, or refused to be part of a church, exactly because they
have encountered some like Ananias and Sappharia, who only ‘pretend’ to share
in ‘the grace
of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
(2Co 13:14 NAS) only for
their own sake? It doesn’t take long for someone to see through the scheming of an
inauthentic life or faith, and when people see it, often they are repulsed and disgusted,
and rightly so.

It’s
important for us to see, however, that even the early church was not ‘a perfect church’ (FF Bruce).Even the most pure, good, and pristine
fellowship can invite the opportunity for insincerity and hypocrisy.In a fallen world, even the greatest good still
creates an opportunity for evil to rise up.Think of how technology invites new ways of identity theft, or how new conveniences
and advances for living can create a culture of leisure rather than a culture
continues to work for the common good.In this world, you can’t have the good without
the probability that evil will corrupt or make some twisted use of it.

IGNITING JUDGMENT

Because
the flow of grace can be corrupted, even among good people and in a good,
growing community, we need to take this story seriously and consider our own way
being or doing church.Are we for
real?Is our faith sincere?Are we putting our hearts into it, or are we
still holding back?While this story is
not given to us as a threat, it is given to us help us resist the accuser and to
expose his own trickery within us.Luke would
have us realize just how destructive Satan’s lies really are, not only because
they put the community of faith at risk, but because they also put the “pretenders”
at risk.

Exactly
what happens to the ‘pretenders’ in this text is both messy and strange.After Peter confronts the lies of both
Ananias and his wife Sapphira, without another word they die---they both lie
and die.“If you lie, you die… makes a captivating sermon title, but it’s
not what what normally happens.Most
people get away with it a bit longer.Peter, lied too and denied, but he didn’t die.Strangely, in this story there is also no
chance to offer repentance or forgiveness to this couple. They die within three hours of each other and
in between Peter and the whole church just sit and wait and watch what happens.
It’s a very strange story, but the
meaning is clear. “The deceit of one’s self
or one’s brothers or sisters in the church leads to death. The story is harsh, severe, uncompromising in
the telling, but how is falsehood ever confronted except in a manner which
always seems severe to the one tangled in deceit?” (Will Willimon) “O what wicked web we weave, when we first
practice to deceive” (Sir Walter Scott).

Most
always, the one most deceived, when we deceive, is us!Just like the Rich Fool (Lk 12: 31-21) who deceived
himself into thinking he could store up goods, not realizing he would die that very
day,the money that Ananias and Sapphira
hold back to make themselves secure, is exactly the money that brings them
down.

People
still think that the money or wealth that is held on to tightly will secure
their future and the future of their own children.Statistics tell us that over 8,000 Americans
have a net worth of over 100 mission dollars, but they give less than 2% of that
large wealth to charities.What are
they keeping it for?Rock singer Sting
made a lot of sense when he said recently, “I’m
not leaving one cent of my millions to my children so it will ruin them….”His wisdom is even more than saying money can’t
buy happiness, but he’s also saying that holding on to money too tightly can actually
bring more misery, more emptiness, and it can rob your soul or the soul of
children of the most important qualities of life? Money is most deceptive, as Dave Ramsey has
said when he asked, “Why do people spend
money they don’t have on things they don’t need to impress people they don’t
know?Those who try to secure their
own future through greed, covetousness, and acquisition, are deceiving themselves
in the worst form.

The
church, of all places, is supposed to be the place where people get real about
the things money can’t do and learn about the things money should do.Church is supposed to be the place, where we
learn, as John Wesley taught, “to earn
all we can, to save all we can’ so we will also “give all we can”.If we
don’t learn such important life lessons, and pass them on to our own children, we
only fool ourselves and we fool them in thinking we will ever really hold
anything back from God.

Interestingly,
the very first time Luke uses the word ‘church’
in Acts comes right at the end of this story (5:11).What
is Luke trying to tell us?Could it be that
even the community of the truth will struggle with truthfulness?

While Luke
paints a very positive picture of the early church, it’s not over
idealized.The church then, as now, is
filled with real people who are pulled in different directions by the same
temptations then that still tug at us now. Right in the third pew from you, you’ll
likely find someone struggling to be faithful or scheming to be foolish in how
they handle what they have and who they are.Someone has have already put their hand to the plow are looking back.Someone thinks they have better things to
do, than to give their whole hearts to God.And some of these are Ananiases and Sapphiras who look a whole lot like the
best of us.Amen, or it is Oh me!

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Several
years ago I was speaking to a elderly Russian Baptist woman about her
family.

“My son’s a preacher too,” she told
me.Then, a tear came into her
eye.

She
continued: “One Sunday, after he
preached, he left the house and we haven’t seen him since.”

“Where did he go, I asked?”

She
was silent.She couldn’t tell me the
awful truth.I had to find it out from
others.Her son, like many others in
those days of atheistic communism, were arrested and taken to hard labor camps
in Siberia were most of them died.This
is how the KGB dealt with those who dared to preach Jesus Christ over Joseph Stalin.

Our
text today says that ‘while Peter and
John were speaking to the people…’, ‘much
annoyed’ authorities came and ‘arrested
them’ (4: 1-3).Most of us can’t imagine preachers being
arrested for preaching.I know I don’t
want to think about it.Still, it’s true, that there are parts of the
world where the Christian faith is not only not appreciated, but also not welcome;
where Christians are persecuted for their faith, and where those who dare
preach or witness, must do so underground or in secret, or risk being
arrested.

A
couple of years ago, the Atlantic Magazine ran an article entitled, “How to Get Yourself Arrested on Moral
Monday in North Carolina”The
article told about religious leaders of different faiths and denominations
showing up on Monday’s to intentionally get themselves arrested and draw
attention to the plight of the poor as politicians drafted new policies about
medical care, unemployment and education.While they being arrested for refusing to clear the legislative building,
they sang “This little light of mine, I’m
gonna let it shine…” and quoted Scriptures such as “Blessed are the peacemakers.”One pastor commented to the reporter for the Atlantic: “There are no unclean people here, only
unclean systems….”Whether you
agree such civil disobedience, you should be thankful to live in a country
where people can peacefully ‘get arrested’ to draw attention to matters of
justice and human need.http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/how-to-get-arrested-on-moral-monday-a-north-carolina-ministers-protest/277070/ .

Do you have
enough faith, enough courage, or enough passion for Jesus Christ, or for God’s
justice that you could be arrested for it?Would there be enough evidence to convict you of being Christian?I’m not wishing for it for any of us, but I
want us to think today about how courageous should be in our own witness for
Jesus Christ in the context our changing, challenging, and a very confused
culture.In today’s passage, we can
clearly see that the church grew because it was passionate, was ‘counter-culture’,
and because it was witnessed in ways that gained the attention of the community
around it.Could we also find ways that could help
embolden our own witness and work for the Lord?

THE REASON FOR COURAGE

The big
mistake the authorities made in arresting Peter and John was that when they
arrested them, the church grew bigger not smaller (4.4).The
more they arrested them; the more they tried to ‘stop the spread’ and ‘warned
them not to speak in his name’ (4.17), the more they did speak and the more
it spread.Have you ever thought about
why this happened?

Part of the
reason they could not ‘stop’ this church from speaking is because the very
message they wanted to stop was the very message that put life in them.We are told that these disciples were
arrested because ‘they were teaching the
people and proclaiming that in Jesus there is the resurrection of the
dead’ (4.2).What was the big deal
aboutpreaching ‘the
resurrection’?

What we
need to understand in this story is that the ‘priests, the captain of temple, and the Sadducees’ (4.1) were not
just the religious parties, but they were also the ruling political parties of
that time.These Sadducees not only did
not believe in any kind of resurrection of the dead, they did not want to.Most of the reason why they did not agree
with the Pharisees, was because the Sadducees were the, wealthy, political
conservatives of the ‘old school thinking,’ who held firmly to the original five
books of the Hebrew Bible, and did not have any desire to follow any of this
new school thinking of the Pharisees, who followed Daniel’s new vision of resurrection.According to Daniel, one day God would
awaken the dead for judgment for both their good or evil deeds (Dan.
12:1ff).If you are rich, if you are
comfortable, if you are in power, and especially if you’re not living the kind
of life you should, of course, you wouldn’t appreciate resurrection where God
takes charge and has the final word either.

What made
the church’s preaching and teaching especially dangerous, is that now they were
teaching this religious perspective with new fervor and new enthusiasm ‘proclaiming’ that ‘in Jesus there is a resurrection of the
dead’ (v.2).This made the growing
church even more of a threat to the ‘political peace’ than the Pharisees
were.Can you grasp why?Don’t miss how ‘the next day’, after Peter and John’s arrest, that ‘rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in
Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all
who were of the high priestly family” (4:5).Do you see that these are the same people
who were in charge of crucifying Jesus?Do you see that these are the people who have the most to lose, if
Jesus, or even if only the teaching of Jesus, has come back to life in
Jerusalem?

If the
resurrection is true, or even if people think it is true, everything might
change.People in charge, or on top, or
in control, do not like change.

The kind of
change the preaching of the church threatened was unique.People in power still recognize it.Recently, I read a review of how Netflix released
a new movie series about Marco Polo’s travel’s in China and his encounter with Kublai
Khan.They became friends, but at the
beginning, at least in the movie, Kublai Khan, was repulsed by the inscription
on the cross he was wearing which said, “All
kingdoms will bow to Christ”.That’s
the ramifications of resurrection that still put fear into the hearts of any
who only want their own life their own way without regard to God or others.But it’s also the kind of hopeful message
that put life and courage into the hearts of ‘uneducated and ordinary’ (13) who are disenfranchised,
disadvantaged, or underprivileged by the ‘principalities
and powers’ of this world.

THE SOURCE OF THEIR COURAGE

While the
church was encouraged and emboldened by the preaching of Christ’s
resurrection—a message that lifted up Jesus as the true Lord of life---the
church was only able to preach and bear witness to this message because they
were filled with the Holy Spirit.Because
he was ‘filled with the Spirit’ (4.8)
Peter was able to face head them head on and look those rulers straight in the
eyes and declare that ‘this Jesus is the
stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone”
(4:11). That’s bold and that’s pure
courage.

There is no
magical, biblical, nor even an educational formula that enabled this church to
become bold in their witness like this.What amazed those rulers themselves was that these were ‘ordinary and uneducated men’ who were ‘recognized as companions of Jesus’
(4.13).Could it be that Luke, the
author of Acts is telling us here, more than we might want to know?Could it be that exactly because they had
been and still were spiritual ‘companions
of Jesus’ that this boldness and courage was now being released in their
speech and in their lives?

Jesus told them that the Father would send the
Spirit to empower them (Acts 1.8) and now the Spirit has come (Acts 2.2).

Because the
church had been faithful to obey, to follow, and to continue to worship this ‘same Jesus’ (Acts 1.11), they were they
now filled and emboldened by the ‘power
of the Holy Spirit’ (1.8) Jesus had promised.Isn’t this the only way the Spirit ever works
and fills our lives too: when we are faithful to ‘this same Jesus’?We are
told in the gospel that the Spirit does not ‘speak for himself’ but is faithful to glorify Jesus (John 16:13).The Spirit will only ‘take what is mine and declare it to you…” (Jn. 16.14), Jesus said.The only way to find the fullness and
filling of God’s Spirit is to make yourself a constant companions of Jesus.It is outrageous
to think that you can buy or obtain the ‘power’, the boldness, or the presence
of God’ Spirit in any other way (Acts 8.19) than by being faithful to the ‘apostles teaching and fellowship’ (Acts
2.42). But what does it mean to be
faithful in a way that leads to a bold witness?

Pastor
James Merritt tells how back in the 1990s,a mission team from the US preached to packed crowds in Romania with
people standing outside in 10° weather, listening to loud-speakers to hear
God’s Word. The U.S. Christians asked Pastor
Josef Tson why Romania had a spiritual fervor and a fire that America didn’t
have. He said, “Americans, here is the
difference. In the United States, you talk about commitment. In Romania, we
talk about surrender. When you are committed to God you hold all the cards. You
decide when you are going to be committed and when you are not. When you
surrender, God holds all the cards.” Then he shared this unbelievable example
to back up his point.

During the
1970s, Tson, who was recognized as probably a leading pastor in the entire
country of Romania, was arrested and imprisoned multiple times. The only thing
they ever charged him with was preaching the Gospel. Every time he was arrested
he would undergo several weeks of intense interrogation, beatings and mind
games and then released.It all came
to a climax in the middle of one night when about 3am in the morning, Romanian
police broke into his home, literally dragged him out of bed, threw him into
the back of a car, took him down to the police station, stripped him naked,
tied him to a chair, and began the most offal beating he said he had ever
incurred. They kept making one demand, “Quit preaching the Gospel. Quit talking
about Jesus.” He absolutely refused.

After hours
the captain of the police station came bursting into the room, pulled up a
chair in front of him and said, “Tson, I am through with you. I am going to ask
you one last time to quit preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ or I am going to
kill you here and now.” Josef Tson said, “I knew that he meant it. At that
moment, I was filled by the Holy Spirit like I have never been before. I looked
at him and here is what I said, ‘Captain, I want to warn you. If you use your
weapon I will be forced to use mine.’” The captain jumped up out of his chair
in fear and said, “Search him immediately! Which was kind of funny, because
Josef Tson was completely naked, but they dutifully did what the captain said.
The captain set back down and said, “What are you talking about?”

Tson said,
“Your weapon is killing. My weapon is dying. Now here is how it works. If you
kill me, my popularity will explode. If you kill me, my tapes, my manuscripts,
and all of my messages will multiply like rabbits. Unbelievers will say, ‘This
man was willing to die for what he was preaching. I’d better hear what he has
to say.’ My sermons will speak 10 time louder after you kill me and because you
killed me. In fact, God will use me to conquer this country because you killed
me. I’m warning you captain, you use your weapon and I’ll be forced to use
mine.”

The captain
of the jail jumped up and said, “Tson, you are crazy! You’ve lost your mind”
and walked out of the room. Later they came back in, gave him his clothes,
dressed him and drove him back to his home. Tson said the next morning, barely
able to walk from the beating, he got up to walk to the church and when he walked
outside there were two Romanian policemen there. He held out his hands thinking
they had come to cuff him and take him back for more beatings and they said,
“Sir, we are not here to arrest you. We are here to protect you.” Tson said,
“What do you mean?” One of the officers said, “Sir, we don’t understand. We
just know we have been given orders to escort you everywhere you go and to make
sure that nothing happens to you.”(From a Sermon by James
Merritt entitled,“Fight Fire with Fire”).

Can we
imagine this kind of courage and ‘boldness’?Can we imagine this kind of surrender and commitment to Christ?

THE MOTIVE FOR THEIR COURAGE

We can only
imagine it when we know that the church was courageous because it boldly
preached and announced that ‘There is
salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among
mortals by which we must be saved (Act 4:12 NRS).

Isn’t the
reason the church lacks boldness today is because we just don’t know how to believe
this, live this, or preach that Jesus as the ‘only way’ of salvation in a world
where there are more ways than we can count?How can we have the same motivation those first disciples had in their
world, when we don’t live in that same world?Do we have the boldness and
courage to preach Jesus as the ‘the way, the truth, and the life’, when even we
have found and do follow so many other ‘healing’ or saving ways, such as our
own politics, our own wealth, our own views of faith and religion?We too know, even as Baptists, Methodists,
Presbyterians, Quakers, or Pentecostals, that there is more are even many
‘ways’ of even finding this ‘one way’ of being saved in Jesus.So, how dare we dare we preach ‘there is salvation in no one else’
when we haven’t even agreed on how this salvation comes to us?

That’s
exactly the protest a woman gave to me when I invited her to church once.She was telling me how proud she was of her
daughter and about that time I invited her and her daughter to our come as
guests at our church.She responded that
her she and her daughter were respectful of all religions, but they didn’t need
to have a particular faith because all religions are the same.That was of course, before 9-11-2001.

This is
exactly the problem with preaching Jesus today, isn’t it?It’s not the big picture that hooks people, saying
that Jesus was a great religious teacher or reformer, but it’s the particular
picture of getting to the claim that God ‘became
flesh and dwelt among us’ in one particular person, in one particular
event, and in one particular people--that’s the problem.How do we preach, that though God has always
be more than Jesus, as he was also in Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets, before
Jesus, that God was uniquely revealed in Jesus or that God is never anything
less than Jesus?How can we preach
Jesus in world where Mohammed, Krishna, and Buddha are just as prominent?Can we still boldly preach that there is ‘salvation in one else’?

My answer
is that not only can we, we must.“There is no other name given among mortals,
whereby we must be saved.”How do
we preach this?When Peter and the
early church spoke these words, they were all still Jews.They were convinced that the only way the
Jewish people could be saved was to follow a way of Jesus, the truth of Jesus
and the life of Jesus.But what was that?Do you know?Do you dare want to know?The
way of Jesus was the way of the cross, the way of sacrifice, the way of giving yourself
to others, and most of all, it was the way of love, even loving ones enemies.There is no salvation in any religion, any
politic, any denomination, or any human reality at all, unless we follow this unique,
exclusive, exceptional, and specific way Jesus revealed God’s love.It is a saving love which also commands and
motivates us to love.Through Christ’s
own sacrifice and death on the cross, he calls us to ‘love God with all our
hearts’ and to ‘love our neighbor as ourselves’, even if it kills us.This is the way all humans everywhere, must
take God serious or we have no hope at all.

This unique
way self-giving love is the only way to take God and religion serious, because
only when we ‘love God with our whole heart in a way that includes loving
others’ we can’t or won’t find any salvation that only God’s love can
bring.Saving love is just that peculiar
and that particular.We have to receive
God’s unconditional love.We have to
give unconditional love.We must love
the God who loves us and we must love the neighbor we need to come to know and we
must love.We can only be saved by such
unique, exceptional love, because only God can love like this and only when a divinely
revealed love becomes real in us, can salvation come to the world.Isn’t this kind of salvation that should
still motivate us?Doesn’t God’s unique
love give us all something to be courageous about, whether it be to be a good
parent, a caring person, or do the right thing in a difficult situation?That’s exactly what Paul Grüninger did.He wasn’t a Peter or John, nor was he a Josef
Tson, but he was ‘courageous’ with his faith.

IN THE
SPRING of 1939,47-year-old Paul Grüninger was a middle-level police official in
St. Gallen, a picturesque Swiss town near the Austrian border. The son of
middle-class parents who ran a local cigar shop and a mediocre student who
enjoyed the soccer field more than his studies, Grüninger became an
unprepossessing man of quiet conventionality. After dutifully serving time in the Swiss army
in World War I, he obtained a teaching diploma, settled into a position at an
elementary school, attended church on Sundays and married Alice Federer, a
fellow teacher.

To please
both his mother and Alice, Grüninger applied for a better-paying position in
the police department, a job that involved mainly filling out reports and
arranging security details for occasional visiting dignitaries. Or so it
seemed. In April 1939, Grüninger found his way to work blocked by a uniformed
officer who told him: “Sir, you no longer have the right to enter these
premises.”

An
investigation had revealed that Grüninger was secretly altering the documents
of Jews fleeing Austria for the safety of Switzerland. “Non-Aryan” refugees
were not allowed to cross the border after August 19, 1938, but all it took was
a few strokes of Griininger’s pen to predate a passport and perhaps save a
life, a small action but one of great personal risk. Grüninger was dismissed
from his position, ordered to turn in his uniform and subjected to criminal
charges. The authorities spread false rumors that Grüninger had demanded sexual
favors from those he aided. Disgraced as a law breaker and shunned by his
neighbors, Grüninger peddled raincoats and animal feed until he died in poverty
in 1972.

Paul
Grüninger is featured in journalist Eyal Press’s book Beautiful Souls, a study of seemingly ordinary people who exhibited
extraordinary and risky courage on behalf of others.Paul Grüninger was not Braveheart. He was an
unassuming man whose family and faith formed him in a world—a kingdom, if you
will—in which anyone who saw what he saw, “the heartbreaking scenes ... the
screaming and the crying of moth- ers and children . . . could not bear it
anymore . . . could do nothing else.” Paul and Alice are buried together near
St. Gallen. Seventy years later a plaque was placed at the foot of Paul’s
grave. It reads: “Paul Grüninger saved hundreds of refugees in 1938/39.” At his
funeral, a choir sang “Nearer My God to Thee,” and a rabbi read from the
Talmud: “He who saves a single life, saves the entire world.”

Just this
past week, in that terrible train wreck in Philadelphia, and in the horror of
that terrible darkness, one uninjured man courageously stayed on the train to
hold the hand of another man who was pinned in the wreckage.“I’m here,”he said.“I’m staying here with
you until they get you out.”Being
extraordinary in courage doesn’t get any more ordinary than that.And isn’t this what the church also does,
saying,“We’re here!“We’re staying with Jesus until everyone gets
out.It is faith in this kind of love
that is great enough to save us all.Amen.

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About Me

With over 30 years of pastoral experience, I've been the pastor of churches in both North Carolina and Germany, where my wife and I served as Missionaries in the 1990's. I'm currently serving as the pastor of two small, rural churches in western Yadkin and northern Iredell counties. I'll be celebrating 30 years of marriage to Teresa in 2010 and we have one married daughter.